Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir
John Paul Stevens
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0316199796
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When he resigned in June 2010, Justice John Paul Stevens was the third-longest-serving Supreme Court justice in American history. As a lawyer and on the court, he worked with five chief justices: as a law clerk during Fred Vinson's tenure, a practicing lawyer when Earl Warren was chief, a circuit judge and junior justice during Warren Burger's term, a contemporary colleague of William Rehnquist, and a colleague of current Chief Justice John Roberts. FIVE CHIEFS is his personal account of the workings of the court from his personal experiences with these men, and the controversial cases they deliberated over, from freedom of speech and affirmative action to capital punishment and sovereign immunity.
Written with humility and grace, and packed with interesting anecdotes, FIVE CHIEFS is an unprecedented and historically significant look at the highest court in the United States.
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to 1969. But there is a question of the exact date he became the engineer. Three days after Warren accepted Eisenhower’s nomination, Eisenhower announced at a press conference that he was making a “recess appointment” of Earl Warren as chief justice of the United States. Later that day, Warren sent a telegram accepting the nomination and also made a more formal statement to the same effect. The written evidence of the appointment was dated October 2, 1953, and he took the oath of office three
contempt, the Groppi resolution was flawed because it was adopted without giving him any notice or affording him an opportunity to present a defense or information in mitigation. A few days before I was sworn in as a judge, a Seventh Circuit panel composed of three excellent judges—John Hastings, Walter Cummings, and Wilbur Pell—reversed Judge Doyle, concluding that no hearing was necessary because the contemptuous conduct had occurred in the presence of the legislators who had adopted the
respect differing from the right by which freeholders chose knights of the shire, or from the right by which judges granted writs of Habeas Corpus, was absolutely necessary to the security of our liberties. Depriving a state of the mysterious right to protect its dignity from its own citizens is equally necessary to protect the federal rights of those citizens. Justice James Wilson, who played a leading role in the drafting of our Constitution, made the point better than I can. Before the
former, a case involving speech intended to inflict emotional distress on the family of a deceased Marine during his funeral, was this oft-quoted statement by Justice Brennan: If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. There is some irony in the chief’s reliance on that statement because four years earlier he had written the Court
January of 2005, when we did not know whether Bill’s developing cancer would make it impossible for him to administer the oath of office at the second inauguration of President George W. Bush. Sally Rider, his highly competent administrative assistant, provided me an especially legible copy of the oath and asked me to be prepared to act as a substitute if necessary. On the cold morning of January 20, I memorized the oath and carried a copy in my pocket when all of the members of the Court except
